From 1825 to 1830 Friedrich Theodor Vischer, born in 1807 as the son of a minister, studied theology and philosophy in Tübingen and gained his doctorate in 1836 in aesthetics and literature. He became an associate professor in 1837, and full professor in1844. With a very candid lecture upon taking office in 1845, he admitted being a Pantheist, which resulted in a two-year teaching ban. In 1848 he took part in the March Revolution and entered Frankfurt Parliament as a member of parliament for the Democratic Left as a moderate left-winger. His two-volume collection of political essays Kritische Gänge (1844) was placed on the Index and an extended version was published in 1860.

From 1855 to 1866 Vischer taught in Zurich and ultimately became a professor at Stuttgart’s Polytechnikum holding lectures there until 1877. Two years later he published the novel Auch Einer. Eine Reisebekanntschaft, which achieved a great deal of popularity with its motif of an encounter between an eccentric with the “perfidy of the object” leading the book to be reprinted several times. The successful author - since 1864 a member of the Royal Bavarian Academy of the Sciences - died ten years later of a severe infection following a trip to Venice.